Offering Services

One comment that is always brought up when people are talking about a new service is, “It’s harder to stop offering a service than it is to start.” Take for example a transit service for handicapped citizens. There is no requirement for a town or city to offer this service. Most places do of course, but they don’t have to. Most of the time those programs have a budget that costs the jurisdiction hundreds of thousands of dollars. On average fares collected from riders only make up about 10-15% of the total cost of offering the service. Can you imagine being in a position where you might have to consider taking something like that away.
Let me be clear though, this is merely an example. Oro Valley’s transit is doing very well and is highly supported. One remarkable thing to note is the volunteers that are working for the service Oro Valley offers.
Oro Valley has a program called Coyote Run. This is a system of buses that is available only for the elderly and disabled citizens of Oro Valley. The busses pickup the citizen and take them anywhere they need to go. As you can imagine there is no private Taxi service in Oro Valley. The program has several drivers that work part and full time. Now they have added volunteers to help with the workload. The amazing thing I discovered was that a few of the volunteers made it clear that they would only volunteer as long as they would not be replacing a paid employee. Thankfully that is not the case. The volunteers are to help with an 11% increase in demand and to allow the paid staff to start taking time off. The message is this, if you are going to think about offering a service that is going to be valued but costly, make sure that you can fund it in good times and tough times. Because I can tell you if you try to take away Coyote Run there would be hundreds of disappointed people.